Free energy of a static quark anti-quark pair and the renormalized Polyakov loop in three flavor QCD

TL;DR

This paper investigates the free energy of static quark-antiquark pairs and the renormalized Polyakov loop in three-flavor QCD at finite temperature, using lattice simulations with different quark masses.

Contribution

It provides new lattice QCD calculations of static quark free energy and Polyakov loop renormalization across various quark masses and lattice spacings.

Findings

Entropy contribution at large distances quantified.

Renormalized Polyakov loop computed for different parameters.

Insights into quark confinement at finite temperature obtained.

Abstract

We study the free energy of a static quark anti-quark pair at finite temperature in three flavor QCD with degenerate quark masses using N_tau=4 and 6 lattices with Asqtad staggered fermion action. The static free energy was calculated for different values of the quark mass and the entropy contribution at large distances has been extracted. We also calculate the renormalized Polyakov loop following the approach by Kaczmarek et al.